Sterling and Peggy Seagrave: Gold Warriors

Sterling Seagrave has agreed to answer questions about his book, Gold Warriors. This is what Robert D. Steele had to say about the book:

This book is earth-shattering and faith-shaking, a well-documented tale of deceit at the highest levels of the US government. So controversial and potentially explosive are the findings of this book, to wit, that the White House recovered most of the Nazi and Japanese loot and created a secret slush fund for covert political operations world-wide, that the authors go the extra mile and offer, at a nominal price, two CD-ROMS containing 60,000 pages of supporting documentation including the Japanese treasure maps used by the US to recover the gold and other valuables.

Major players include Presidents Truman, Eisenhower, and Nixon, both Allen and John Foster Dulles, Douglas MacArthur, John McCloy, and the famous unconventional warrior Edward Lansdale. What we learn from this book is that those writing about "blowback" (the consequences of unwise US actions) have barely scratched the surface. What we learn is that rather than truly seeking to help the Japanese, Chinese, and other looted nations recover in the aftermath of WWII, the most senior leaders of the US government, no doubt with the best of intentions, actually conspired with Nazi bankers and the Japanese imperial family to create a Black Eagle Trust controlled by a very select hand-picked cabal in Washington.

Originally used to fight communism, the Black Eagle Trust, according to the authors and as thoroughly documented by the book and the two CD-ROMS (which I am happy to have in hand), quickly became a global slush fund used to bribe national leaders and manipulate elections around the world. This fund remains in existence today, making the Swiss Holocaust funds seem like loose-change. According to the authors, major banks are "addicted" to the funds and would face collapse if public investigations resulted in a forced return of this gold and related certificates to the rightful owners.

The authors have produced a magnificent work of both scholarship and investigative journalism. They document the extent of Japanese looting of Korea (beginning in 1895) and China as well as the other countries in the "co-prosperity sphere." They document the manner in which Japan hid most of the gold in the Philippines (some in Indonesia), and were forced to leave it there from 1943 onwards, when US submarine interdiction became too effective to risk shipments homeward.

I found the level of detail in this book to be quite gripping. The ingenious nature of the Japanese burial sites, with caverns below the more obvious tunnels, with sea-water protection, with maps created in reverse--and the in-bred cruelty of the Japanese, thinking nothing of burying all of the US and other national slave labor *and the Japanese engineers* alive as the final stage of protecting the looted treasure, leave one stunned.

The authors document the central role played by Lansdale in recognizing the opportunity and then briefing MacArthur and then President Truman. According to the authors, the architects of the Black Eagle Trust were three advisors to President's Roosevelt's Secretary of War, Henry Stimson: John McCloy (later head of the World Bank), Robert Lovett (later Secretary of Defense), and Robert Anderson (later Secretary of the Treasury). They made the case to Roosevelt, and presumably to Truman after Roosevelt died, that it would be impractical to return the looted gold to the rightful owners, in part because many of the looted countries were now under Soviet control.

The authors, who conducted many interviews in support of the work, including interviews of former CIA deputy director Ray Cline, who they say was involved with Lansdale and the gold in the 1940's and remained involved with the black gold through the 1980's, provide copies of documents showing the redirection of the looted gold to 176 bank accounts in 42 countries. The gold was then used to support the creation of gold bearer certificates that were in turned used to bribe the most senior officials around the world.

The authors tell a shocking tale of how quickly MacArthur chose to collaborate with the very leadership of Japan that declared war on the USA and was responsible for genocide and looting in Asia on a scale rarely achieved by anyone else. Bringing the story up to date, the authors show how prior attempts to investigate the Black Eagle Trust have led to the ruin of individuals such as Norbert Schlei, at one time deputy attorney general to Presidents Kennedy and Johnson. While I have no direct knowledge and cannot be certain myself, I believe the authors have provided a sufficiently compelling case to warrant an international investigation concurrently with a General Accounting Office investigation to be chartered by Congress with unlimited supeona powers specifically directed against classified personalities and archives.

If this story is true, and I personally think that it is, then the US government, in active collusion with the very people the American people fought to defeat in WWII, has been guilty of fraud and depravity on a global scale and against the best interests of both the American people, and the against the rightful owners of the looted gold and other treasures. The authors may well have uncovered the last really big secret of the post-WW II era, and in so doing, opened the way for a restoration of the balance of power among diverse nations, and a sharp delimitation of the abuses that appear to characterize American leadership when it thinks it can rely on secret gold and stolen oil to engage in imperial adventures and domestic improprieties. As an American citizen and voter, and as a person of faith who believes that we must do unto others as we would have them do unto us, I find this book to be shocking, credible, and a basis for popular outrage and demands for truth and reconciliation.

Attached Files

I have to confess I have not studied very much Japanese history. Therefore, most of what you have written in Gold Warriors is new to me. It is a fascinating story and would make a great television documentary. It could also be turned into a Hollywood movie. The image of the 175 chief engineers holding a party 220 feet underground in the mountains of Luzon while General Yamashita and the Japanese princes slip out and give the orders for the dynamite charges to be set off in the access tunnels, entombing the men inside, would give the film a great start. Hollywood likes explosions. The story also provides plenty of torture scenes that would go down well with the masses. Unfortunately, the story line would severely damage popular conceptions of the behaviour of the United States government following the Second World War.

(1) I would like to start by asking you what kind of reaction did you get when the book was first published in the United States? Was the book discussed in the mainstream media? For example, I do not remember it being discussed in the UK media.

(2) On page 6 you explain how John Foster Dulles arranged the signing of the peace treaty that stated “the Allied Powers waive all reparations claims of the Allied Powers and their nationals arising out of any actions taken by Japan”. On page 7 you add that “at the end of the post war occupation, all Japan’s indicted war criminals were set free”. You also mention the role played by John J. McCloy played in these events. Is there any connection with McCloy’s actions in Germany in 1950-51? For example, appointing Reinhard Gehlen as head of the West German Secret Service and the freeing of German industrialists, Alfried Krupp and Friedrich Flick, who had both been convicted of serious war crimes at Nuremberg.

(3) Several of the people involved in setting up and administrating the Black Eagle Trust: John Foster Dulles, John J. McCloy, Edward Lansdale, Robert B. Anderson, Paul Helliwell, Ray Cline, etc., were later involved in some very dubious activities. Is there any connection between what these men did in Japan and their relationship with the far-right and the arms and oil industries?

(1) I would like to start by asking you what kind of reaction did you get when the book was first published in the United States? Was the book discussed in the mainstream media? For example, I do not remember it being discussed in the UK media.

Normally, we have written about China, so after the initial outrage and very serious death threats over THE SOONG DYNASTY, and the banning of the book in Taiwan, things calmed down. The Chiangs and Soongs fell from grace, the KMT fell from power, and three different Chinese translations of SOONG were done in Taiwan. But when we published THE YAMATO DYNASTY about Japan’s imperial family, and the way it was manipulated by the JP Morgan and Rothschild clique starting in the mid 19th century (exactly as they did during the same epoch in America), and how they used the Quaker network in the palace to keep Hirohito on the throne after WW2, we quickly found that we had instantly become the enemies of the Chrysanthemom Club. This is the Japan lobby, very similar to the Taiwan lobby, but different players. We exposed one of the key players, the DCM at the US Embassy in Japan, who was married to the daughter of Japan’s finance minister. To avoid scandal, he was immediately recalled to Washington where he used his new position at DoS to attack us. Starting by planting extremely negative and false reviews of YAMATO in the NYT and WashPost. So, when word got out that we were working on GOLD WARRIORS, we began to be sabotaged in advance. We were deceitfully approached by a NYC publisher who then had our book vetted by a Washington attorney closely tied to the CIA – so the CIA knew all about it. We discovered we were blocked at every major publisher in the USA. We tried UK publishers and Transworld (which had sold over 60,000 copies of LORDS OF THE RIM), refused even to look at GOLD WARRIORS. So, we knew we’d been slipped the Black Spot. We decided to let our usual French publisher launch the book in French. Both YAMATO DYNASTY and GOLD WARRIORS did very well in French and were widely reviewed. Because so many WW2 victims were dying of old age, we felt compelled to get an English language edition out, so we published one in trade paper format at a French printer, which we sold on-line at our website. When Verso Books read it, they freaked and immediately bought it from us, saying it was « your incredible book ». Verso did a very fine job, both in UK and the US where they had a standing distribution deal with WW Norton. There was a flurry of impressive reviews, all to be seen at our website www.bowstring.net but Chalmers Johnson, doyen of Japan scholars in the US, chose to review it in the London Review of Books rather than the New York Review of Books or the Los Angeles Times. He was a great admirer of Norbert Schei, but had been a consultant to the CIA for decades, so he was wary about giving the book such a positive review inside America.

(2) On page 6 you explain how John Foster Dulles arranged the signing of the peace treaty that stated “the Allied Powers waive all reparations claims of the Allied Powers and their nationals arising out of any actions taken by Japan”. On page 7 you add that “at the end of the post war occupation, all Japan’s indicted war criminals were set free”. You also mention the role played by John J. McCloy played in these events. Is there any connection with McCloy’s actions in Germany in 1950-51? For example, appointing Reinhard Gehlen as head of the West German Secret Service and the freeing of German industrialists, Alfried Krupp and Friedrich Flick, who had both been convicted of serious war crimes at Nuremberg.

Yes, as we explain in much greater detail later in the book, McCloy was part of the group that used Nazi looted gold and Jap looted gold to set up the Black Eagle Trust and a multitude of slush funds growing out of it. We identify most of these people in our book, and they are essentially the same people you include in your excellent Assassination text. Webster Tarpley and Tony Chaitkin also identify them in THE UNAUTHORIZED BIOGRAPHY OF GEORGE BUSH. And they’ve been identified in other books we list in our bibliography, such as those about the Dulles claque and the Carlisle Group. It’s a network that includes the actual owners of The Fed and The Bank of England, Brown Brothers Harriman, Morgan-Chase, Citibank, Rockefeller Holdings, Bilderbergs, Bohemian Grove, Alpine Lodge, etc. etc. I think of the apex of this group as the Druids. Below them are their servants. People like McCloy, the Dulles Brothers, were just outsiders who became insiders because they had talent and could do the leg work. We added two additional chapters to the trade paperback from Verso, which explains a lot about these networks. We’ve dealt with them in the past in ALL our nine books, in different ways, which means we’ve spent thirty years writing about them in various manifestations. The more we learn, the more interesting it becomes (and the more depressing).

(3) Several of the people involved in setting up and administrating the Black Eagle Trust: John Foster Dulles, John J. McCloy, Edward Lansdale, Robert B. Anderson, Paul Helliwell, Ray Cline, etc., were later involved in some very dubious activities. Is there any connection between what these men did in Japan and their relationship with the far-right and the arms and oil industries?

Sure. Allen Dulles was a servant of the people who set up the Fed, and Edward Lansdale also. Lansdale was extremely close to HL Hunt and the Murchisons, and to Bill Pawley, Meyer Lansky, Nixon, Santo Trafficante, Shackley and Clines. Col. Fletcher Prouty, who firstmet Lansdale in Manila in 1945 and later became the primary liaison between DIA and CIA, while also being a VIP pilot of Air Force One, was a crucial source for our research. He personally identified Lansdale in the crowd at Dealey Plaza. You may not know this, but if they had failed at Dealey Plaza, JFK was supposed to go hunting with the Texas Robber Barons the following day. I could go on and on and on.

In your book you describe the atrocities committed by the Japanese. The historian R. J. Rummel’s claims that between 1937 and 1945, the Japanese military murdered between 6,000,000 and 10,000,000 Chinese, Indonesians, Koreans, Filipinos, and Indochinese, among others, including Western prisoners of war. It seems to me that this is comparable to the Nazi Holocaust.

(1) Why do you think it has not received the same sort of attention as the crimes committed by the Germans?

(2) What role did the American authorities play in the media presentation of these events?

(3) What was the motivation of the American authorities to cover-up these events?

(4) Is it a coincidence that John McCloy was involved in both protecting Nazi and Japanese war criminals after the war?

.....I think of the apex of this group as the Druids. Below them are their servants. People like McCloy, the Dulles Brothers, were just outsiders who became insiders because they had talent and could do the leg work. We added two additional chapters to the trade paperback from Verso, which explains a lot about these networks.

Mr. Seagrave,

Thanks for joining this Forum. I've enjoyed reading all of your posts. Based on information in this and other threads I just ordered the hardback edition of Gold Warriors. I'm looking forward to reading it.

Could you briefly elaborate on the two additional chapters contained in the paperback version? Thank you very much.

In your book you describe the atrocities committed by the Japanese. The historian R. J. Rummel’s claims that between 1937 and 1945, the Japanese military murdered between 6,000,000 and 10,000,000 Chinese, Indonesians, Koreans, Filipinos, and Indochinese, among others, including Western prisoners of war. It seems to me that this is comparable to the Nazi Holocaust.

(1) Why do you think it has not received the same sort of attention as the crimes committed by the Germans?

Arriving at a probable number of Japan’s war victims who died is difficult for several interesting reasons, which have to do with Western perceptions. Both Americans and Europeans fell into the unfortunate habit of seeing WW1 and WW2 as separate wars, failing to comprehend that they were interlaced in a multitude of ways (not merely that one was the consequence of the other, or of the rash behavior of the victors after WW1). Wholly aside from this basic misconception, most Americans think of WW2 in Asia as having begun with Pearl Harbor, the British with the fall of Singapore, and so forth. The Chinese would correct this by identifying the Marco Polo Bridge incident as the start, or the Japanese seizure of Manchuria earlier. It really began in 1895 with Japan’s assassination of Korea’s Queen Min, and invasion of Korea, resulting in its absorption into Japan, followed quickly by Japan’s seizure of southern Manchuria, etc. - establishing that Japan was at war from 1895-1945. Prior to 1895, Japan had only briefly invaded Korea during the Shogunate, long before the Meiji Restoration, and the invasion failed. Therefore, Rummel’s estimate of 6-million to 10-million dead between 1937 (the Rape of Nanjing) and 1945, may be roughly corollary to the time-frame of the Nazi Holocaust, but it falls far short of the actual numbers killed by the Japanese war machine. If you add, say, 2-million Koreans, 2-million Manchurians, Chinese, Russians, many East European Jews (both Sephardic and Ashkenazy), and others killed by Japan between 1895 and 1937 (conservative figures), the total of Japanese victims is more like 10-million to 14-million. Of these, I would suggest that between 6-million and 8-million were ethnic Chinese, regardless of where they were resident. So, the late Iris Chang and many others have been correct in concluding that the Japanese holocaust is in every way the equal of the Nazi holocaust, even in terms of the bizarre, grotesque, and barbaric manner in which these ethnic Chinese were murdered. It goes beyond ethnicity, because hundreds of thousands of Filipinos were slaughtered in equally grisly fashion by the Japanese, as were ethnic Indonesians and Malays. I count myself very lucky, indeed, because my father spirited me and my mother and brother off to Rangoon, where we got aboard the last refugee ship to Calcutta (my father staying behind to care for wounded), so when the Japanese arrived at our town on the Chinese border, they were only able to find our two Irish terriers. After summoning the entire local population together, they hung the two terriers up in a banyan tree, and hacked them apart with their swords, as our proxies.

Peter's note about the ex-Nazi's, their techniques and their later involvement in all the usual covert ops and conspiracies links right into this old John Judge piece, 'Assassination as a Tool of Fascism'.

(2) What role did the American authorities play in the media presentation of these events?

The death of FDR brought about a sea-change in America that restored to power essentially the same group that had gained control under Woodrow Wilson and hugely expanded that power under Herbert Hoover. They were the same people who would have preferred an alliance with the Nazis against the Soviets, but were outmaneuvered by FDR and Churchill. Many of them had never lost power under FDR, simply submerging, remaining as a 5th Column, or taking refuge in the OSS, or on Wall Street. Averell Harriman, for example, posed as a Democrat, while his magazine NEWSWEEK became a key reactionary instrument in attacking the credentials of war crimes investigators, journalists, and sabotaging systematically the long-projected reform of Japan into a democratic society. Only land reform was accom-plished before the group including Hoover, Harriman, Morgan, Rockefeller, and others using General MacArthur as their cat’s-paw, were able to redeem Hirohito, free all the indicted war criminals from Sugamo Prison, and enlist the most dangerous of them to suppress any form of democracy, labor unions, or multi-party democracy, re-turning government to the wartime fascists where power remains today. This was done not only to fulfill America’s Puritanical obsession with righteous money, but to acquire Japan (the most industrialized country in Asia) as an economic ally, and as a fascist bulwark against the encroaching Maoists, Stalinists, Trotskyites, or any group of underdogs whose protests could easily be labeled Leftist. Control of US and European media was a priority, a lesson learned from Goebbels, and the vast treas-ures looted by the Nazis and the Japanese were used in secret slush funds to acquire newspapers, magazines, radio and later television, throughout the world. This was an imperfect effort at Mediopoly, but it had the result of dumbing down the audience. And in the meantime war crimes investigators who persisted in Asia were victims of “assisted suicide” or mysterious plane crashes. Thousands of European and Asian POWs and civilian prisoners and slave laborers were buried alive in mine-shafts and treasure vaults by Japanese corporations like Mitsubishi, while survivors were warned not to pursue lawsuits for compensation. Those tainted Japanese corporations quickly regained their global leverage, claiming that their war crimes had been the work of different, earlier, management.

(3) What was the motivation of the American authorities to cover-up these events?

Ultimately, the motive of American politicians, financiers, industrialists, lobbyists, and their journalistic pawns, was to replace global European empires with an American empire - to profit in countless ways from WW2 as they had from WW1. They were quick to do so, so quick that OSS agents in Bangkok who thought they were still at war with fascism were astonished to be replaced overnight by CIA agents who were allied with fascism against communism - publicly. It soon became evident even to the slow-witted among them that power and leverage were attained and secured by money, so once the Nazi and Japanese war loot was in the pipeline, drugs and the laundering of drug money replaced gold as the universal standard backing the dollar. It is no exaggeration to say that the day after WW2 ended, Richard Nixon woke up in bed with Meyer Lansky.

.....I think of the apex of this group as the Druids. Below them are their servants. People like McCloy, the Dulles Brothers, were just outsiders who became insiders because they had talent and could do the leg work. We added two additional chapters to the trade paperback from Verso, which explains a lot about these networks.

Mr. Seagrave,

Thanks for joining this Forum. I've enjoyed reading all of your posts. Based on information in this and other threads I just ordered the hardback edition of Gold Warriors. I'm looking forward to reading it.

Could you briefly elaborate on the two additional chapters contained in the paperback version? Thank you very much.

Mike Hogan

Mr. Hogan ~

After our first edition was published, we were deluged with new material, some of it surprising to us. Such as the discovery that General Yamashita's chauffeur, said to have committed suicide after being tortured by Lansdale and Santa Romana, was still alive two years ago. It appears that his suicide was a red herring to mislead. That he was heavily bribed to reveal the locations of 12 treasure vaults, and then was given safe passage back to Japan and possibly a new identity by MacArthur's G-2. We therefore added two new chapters to the Verso paperback second edition. For those who read the 1st edition, we put these new chapters on a third CD, the set of three CDs of documentation now available at our website: www.bowstring.net including a color photo of the chauffeur (Kojima) taken two years ago in the Philippines.

It is difficult for me to overstate the importance of "Gold Warriors" to a meaningful understanding of the deep political structure -- its style and its substance.

Secret governments must have their secret treasuries, I suspect.

I'm currently at work on what by all indications should be a major television project -- a multi-episode drama in which the historical events related in "GW" play a central role. If all goes well I'm certain that we'll have much to discuss.

In the interim, and for the purpose of addressing the interests of this forum, I wonder if you might expand upon the so-called "Umbrella" organization. If you're not already aware of the fact, you should know that the symbol of an open umbrella is directly relevant to the investigation of the identities and motives of the Dealey Plaza conspirators.

Ascribe it to mere intuition and/or the creative process in full swing, but I can't help thinking that the designers of the assassination somehow signed their work.

(4) Is it a coincidence that John McCloy was involved in both protecting Nazi and Japanese war criminals after the war?

It is no coincidence. McCloy was, like the Dulles brothers, one of a large group of handmaidens of the oligarchs in America who were cultivated by the oligarchs of Europe - a struggle that began with Jefferson versus Hamilton. After a number of false starts, the European oligarchs were able to manipulate the US Civil War and to guide the wealthy men who emerged from it into creating the American versions of Japan’s zaibatsu conglomerates. These Robber Barons, who had interlocking direc-torships, were then shown how to create the Federal Reserve and fiat money (all un-der their private control). The same men (J.P. Morgan prominent among them as an agent of the Rothschilds) did the same thing in Japan following the Meiji Restoration, working initially through Jardines, then through Morgan, and the Quaker network in Japan’s imperial family. Rescuing and protecting their counterparts in Germany and Japan became a priority for Wall Street, and McCloy, Harriman, the Dulles Brothers, and many others were as busy after WW2 as they were after WW1, knitting back to-gether the network of vast wealth and power now identified with the Trilateral Com-mission, the World Bank, the IMF, the Bilderbergers, Bohemian Grove, P2, the Al-pine Lodge, Knights of Malta, ad nauseum. Unlike the Robber Barons, McCloy was not born rich, but he did not have to take off his shoes and socks to count above ten. Hence his unusual role in global affairs.

I count myself very lucky, indeed, because my father spirited me and my mother and brother off to Rangoon, where we got aboard the last refugee ship to Calcutta (my father staying behind to care for wounded), so when the Japanese arrived at our town on the Chinese border, they were only able to find our two Irish terriers. After summoning the entire local population together, they hung the two terriers up in a banyan tree, and hacked them apart with their swords, as our proxies.

Fascinating story. Have you considered writing your autobiography?

During your research into the OSS, have you come across the name Jack Alston Crichton? It would be highly significant if he was in China at the end of the war.

Jack Anderson, Mitchell L. WerBell III, Robert Emmett Johnson, John Singlaub, Phil Graham, William Pawley, Tommy Corcoran, Whitey Willauer, Claire Lee Chennault, Paul Helliwell, E. Howard Hunt, Lucien Conein and Ray Cline were all in China during the Second World War. Later, they were all involved in CIA covert operations. Is this just a coincidence?